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OmnipotentEntity wrote:
Windows Movie Maker? Really?
yes, haha... it's the only free program that i know that can easily import a picture (logo) without having to do all these complicated avisynth codes and whatnot.
Flygon wrote:
Windows Movie Maker really isn't a good idea... there is noticeable quality loss no matter how you export.
hm... there shouldn't be any noticeable quality loss if you create a custom profile with highest possible bitrate and 60 fps. i doubt h.264 at 1000 kbps can be better than wmv at 50000 kbps.
btw, did you try using worse settings with x264 yet? like subme5 and disable trellis. you'll get a slightly smaller size using CRF. i recommend using bad settings because they compress better. it will save a lot of time for encoders.
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why did someone vote no on this? maybe he thought this TAS was too insane and shouldn't be published.
5 different authors, that's the most i've seen. and 400000 rerecords for a 4 minute movie? i guess there were some kind of scripts or bots used to get that many rerecords?
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Seems very complicated... I'd just drag the logo and avi into windows movie maker, save (using a high bitrate), and then compress it again (with x264) with avidemux.
Btw, i've noticed a strange thing about encoding. If you have better settings, you produce a larger filesize (using CRF). For example if you have subme10. Subme5 is produces a little smaller files, and is faster too. Trellis also creates larger filesize, lol. I know it sounds strange, but try it.
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AnotherGamer wrote:
Why exactly did you get the Eclipse tablet if you never used it?
It's necessary to get before being able to get other items from the center ring.
Also, manipulating RNG to get some Excaliburs to replace the Shift Sword with would've probably been quicker in the long run.
As far as I know, the orihalcons which are required to forge Excaliburs can only be obtained after you've got the teleport magic near the end of the game (Mars Lighthouse), so you'd have to backtrack a lot, so it would probably lose a lot of time. Forging items takes a long time too.
The 'Return to last Sanctum'-trick can be performed, when controlling Felix the very first time with the result, that you will be in the sactum of daila, skipping a LOT of dialogue.
With this trick I was able to save a bunch of frames over the submitted run, which adds up to 5585 - yup, 5585 - frames saved until leaving daila. :D
Cool, I heard about this from KirkQQ before. It's good I didn't spend too much time optimizing my run since it's this easy to find improvements to the strategy :P. Would be nice if you could make an avi or post your progress on youtube, because I and several others still can't get it to sync.
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wekhter wrote:
I have to wonder how much time could be saved by optimizing movement and menus.
I would guess around 8 minutes. To make a better approximation you could compare my run with the beginning of the improved TAS to see how much he saved in 10 minutes for example, and then calculate how much that would be in 6.5 hours. I didn't use frame advance in the menus (just slow motion) which is why they aren't as fast as possible.
Why didn't you use the retreat glitch, anyway?
I thought it was lame because it skips so much of the game. But now later, I think it would have been an interesting idea, because it would have made the boss fights harder (more strategy would be required).
adelikat wrote:
Since you are a published author under nfq, that should be the name on all your submissions for consistency
I see, I'll keep that in mind next time if I submit something.
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p4wn3r wrote:
Boss battles looked long, especially Doom Dragon, but I don't know how they could be shortened.
the last boss battle could have been done a few seconds faster if i had killed my first party earlier so that i would have had time to use more of the summons of the other party. this last part was a little annoying to do because loading and saving states took like 1 second, maybe because of the large size of the vbm file or the save states, plus i did it on my old slower computer.
I'm inclined to vote Yes, but I'll marathon it in real time in the weekend to give more constructive comments.
thanks, that would be useful if i do another TAS of this in the future.
jlun2 wrote:
Also, 12357 rerecords for a 6 hour long movie seems low. Are you sure this is optimized?
lol... not 100% sure, but 99... nah, i know it's a little unoptimized, at least the execution, like walking in perfectly straight lines and doing stuff in menus, but the route and planning should be decent. in a long TAS like this, it's hard to find out the best route and strategies, so if there's a mistake somewhere, all that effort that it took to perfect it would have to be redone, so i didn't put that much time on the execution. perfect execution would only save maybe 10 minutes from this run (and it would be very time consuming), while a simple strat change could save 30 minutes (for example, kirkQQ mentioned sacred feathers, which could probably be used to save several minutes).
another reason for the low rerecord count is because there's so much text and walking. the text doesn't require any rerecords, just autofire (except if you really want to optimize it, you might have to do it frame by frame).
NinG wrote:
for some reason, i can't get this to sync either (i have a 32-bit OS btw). maybe there's something wrong with my rom. that would have been interesting to see, even though it's short. maybe you could post your progress on your youtube channel if you have one?
-
these no-exp boss fights are quite impressive: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVgme8nOkq4
there's probably some useful strategies there that could be used in a TAS.
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mklip2001 wrote:
1) Does this submission file actually play through to the end? (If it doesn't, we can't make encodes either...)
For me it doesn't even go past the 'name entering screen' for some reason, but some get it to play to the end (I'll have to try what p4wn3r said, but I've tried pretty much everything). Badpotato made some save states for this, you can download them in the topic I linked to.
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nice to see this get improved again. forgot to comment on this earlier. btw, i really wonder how the sega record could be 17.82 on 4-2? we have still only improved that to 17.79 with TASing, so how could the sega developers have gotten 17.82 without TASing back in 1995 when they made the game? they must have really had some skill, lol, or maybe they knew something about that level that we don't, or perhaps they just put a random time there.
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Yeah, would be interesting to see a TAS of this whole game. But if you search on youtube, Wyster seems to have done most levels already though: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=perfect+dark+tas&aq=f
I invented a new custom combat simulator challenge recently, since playing against 8 dark sims was too easy for TAS. I call it 'meatsim challenge'. Basically, you are in a team of 4 meat sims against a team of 4 dark sims, so the dark sims (i changed the type into 'speedsims' to make them even harder) keep slaughtering the meat sims which makes them gain points really fast. Here's demonstration of it played normally without tool-assistance (i highly doubt it's possible to beat it without tools): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byyLPEpai14
And here's the TAS: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWjmVtsB0ew
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15 min limit? Cool, I didn't know this before because the Swedish translation of youtube kinda sucks. And even if I keep changing the language to US it always changes back to Swedish again.
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Zeupar wrote:
Can you use all of those tricks, techniques and shortcuts on the Japanese ROM? If that is the case, why did you decide to use the American ROM?
Probably because this is an English site and English rules the internet: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm
Japanese is a surprisingly big language too though, considering how small the country is.
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so many bugs in this game. i especially like the bug where you drop bugs on the ground and turn them into medallions.
btw, why does AKA's comments have big letters thrown in there randomly in some words? some hidden message?
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MrGrunz wrote:
it would be basicly a 4 hour TAS project. but not just that, the time it takes to plan such a run is already ridicolus. it took me and slowking already months to plan the any% run (bomb uses etc.)
it doesn't have to be so insanely perfect. i made a 6.5 hour long golden sun 2 TAS a few years ago, and it only took a few weeks to plan and make.
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at first i thought this would be the most boring TAS ever, but it was pretty cool. i'm not familiar with the game, but at least there was some nice drawing skills. i especially liked the hookshot.
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Derakon wrote:
Now, can you do a non-camping team deathmatch against all darksims? :)
what does non-camping mean? do you mean that i would play against a team of 8 dark sims? that actually makes it a lot easier, because all the sims will be gathered in one place, and i can just shoot and i will hit somebody (or shoot a rocket and kill 8), while they can only get one kill at a time. it's easy to win against a team of 8 darks sims even unassisted.
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Addict wrote:
Cool. Does anyone know how to TAS (STUPIDEST QUESTION EVER)? I mean I know what a TAS is and stuff and I downloaded Mupen but I can't seem to find the hotkeys place so I can choose what buttons to have for savestates and frame by frame slowdown etcetc. I used to be able to but this seems like a new version of mupen.